DRM-free physical media: dead in the water or the answer to art’s prayers?

A Kickstarter to create a DRM-free HD video format caters to small-time artists.

Since the video format wars of the mid 2000's, Blu-ray has reigned supreme for physical high-definition video media. One problem with the high-density, high-definition optical disc format is that it's also proprietary. Several layers of access-control are built onto those disks, making them (relatively) expensive to produce, but also much harder to make copies for backups and sharing.

Preventing sharing is exactly the point for a lot of the big name companies that make up the Blu-ray Association. Their goal is exactly the opposite of what free-culture buffs like Terry Hancock want for their artistic endeavors. In fact, that's why Hancock's running a Kickstarter to fund his next project: writing an open-source, completely free format to put HD video on SDHC cards.

Hancock is a contributor to Free Software Magazine and has worked as a research assistant on the McDonald Observatory planet search program. While he's always been a free-culture advocate, his recent Kickstarter is pushing him more into the roll of activist. He’s an avid science fiction buff (“I love the first 45 minutes of Alien," he wrote to Ars. "Not that I didn't like the rest of the film—it's a fine horror film—but it was the science-fiction that blew me away.”). His latest project—an animated sci-fi video called Lunatics—is what spurred this particular project, which he calls “Lib-Ray”.

Hancock asserts that Lib-Ray won't require too much complex code. He plans on creating a simple wizard for authoring high-definition videos (which can be made complete with HTML5-based menus and subtitle functionality) on SD cards, writing a player for the Flash media, and authoring documentation so that anyone can improve or customize his design.

Lib-ray will use the common MKV video container format with VP8 video at 30 frames per second in 1080p. Hancock says he’ll eventually extend this to 60 fps, 3D, and then 4K video quality (if you donate over $100, he says he’ll give you an experimental "Lib-Ray 4K" release of a 15 minute short called Sintel by the Blender Foundation). He’ll use Webkit libraries to build out the menus then, voila!, a completely free way to put high-definition files on physical media.

That "physical media" part has some disparaging Lib-ray as pointless, though. "It seems silly to introduce a new physical media format in this day and age. Physical formats rely on wide acceptance, and a DRM-free open format based on expensive SD cards isn't going to attract any serious content producers," Reddit user "adrij" suggested.

But Hancock told Ars that he’s got no illusions of starting revolutions with his project. Lib-ray isn’t about taking the industry by storm, it’s about creating options for niche communities that already know they’ll probably never make it big. Necessity is the mother of Lib-Ray in this case: Hancock wanted to release a high-definition version of his Lunatics project, but was unsatisfied with the idea of giving backers a code to download copies of the movie. "I don't like the idea of selling an inferior copy of my film on DVD to people in a Kickstarter and then having the really high-quality version available only as a free download. That just seems backwards to me. The collector's edition offline version I sell to somebody should be the very best experience I can put in a box."

Essentially, Lib-ray is meant to cater to an entirely different business model than Blu-ray presupposes: one in which the movie is likely already paid for (by, say, a Kickstarter), and the movie is the gift to donors rather than the commodity to be sold. This is a situation for local and fringe artists who admit they won’t please everyone, but they’ll please a small audience a lot. These artists expect "shorter runs and higher prices per unit," Hancock wrote to Ars. "That works against the mass-pressing mentality of the Blu-Ray and DVD production process, where you have to print a 1000 disks to break even. With Lib-Ray, though, you can print 10 or even 1 if you like. It's more expensive per unit, but it scales well down to short runs...And of course, it's not just about the money, it's also about the DRM, the message that sends to your fans, and the fact that you're fueling an industry which is no friend to free-culture or independent film producers."

So what about the $19,000 he’s trying to raise? It may seem a little pricey, considering the file formats exist online already, and he’s simply adding HTML5 menus to an MKV video container and writing that to an SDHC card. But Hancock says that’s how much it will cost for him to put aside other projects and see Lib-ray come to fruition. "I had originally intended to avoid doing any actual programming on Lib-Ray, because I'm not a pro, and I'm sure there are people who could do a better, or at least faster job of it. Instead, I would just focus on the data standard, and hope that having content in the format would encourage someone to want to work on getting it to play properly," Hancock told Ars. "But after a year of publishing articles about the idea and presenting to people, I didn't get any nibbles from developers interested in going the few extra steps to make it work smoothly... So I thought, 'How hard can it be?

"It seems like it ought to be really hard, because Blu-Ray was expensive to develop. But when you look closely, you realize that all of the money went to pay for the DRM. The actual task of making a video standard that supports high-definition playback and a menu system is just not that complicated. There are open standards, so it's just a matter of picking the ones you want to use and making sure you have a player that can handle those choices." And as they say, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

70 Reader Comments

Are SD cards still considered "expensive media"? I can get a 8gb micro SDHC card for $7 or less on Newegg. A FOSS codec on a 7-dollar card should be easily redistributable for less than $10 total, wouldn't you think? Actually less than that, if it's left to end users to supply their own media.

Well all those protection layers are BS. Bluray rips are just as easy to share as dvds for the file sharing community. The problem with sharing Bluray movies is its size. Most torenters will go for a smaller formatted film that has been remuxed to a single file avi mkv mp4 or what ever they choose. There is nothing Hollywood can do to stop some one from duplicating a bluray, other than offer it on a advert funded site. The copy protection does not apply if it is not going to be put on another bluray. If these movies get downloaded they go to a hard drive and get played from there.

The more they try to stop the 3% of the public who participate in file sharing the more trouble they will create for them selves. All they are dong is wasting money and time that could be going to profits.

The scene is alive because of control freaks. The scene enjoys cracking drm just for a laugh. These guys don't do it for the money.

My advice to hollywood would be to learn from these guys business model. Give it away and sell advert space on their sites. Ninja video is one example.

DRM is optional no? I mean you can produce a DVD without any DRM. People do so all the time with home movies. Pirated movies have the DRM removed, yet are shipped in regular formats like AVI and MPEG. So why is a new format needed?

I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If you want a HD movie on an SD card, all you have to do is copy the movie file onto the SD card. Are fancy menus and a player really necessary? There are several perfectly good free players such as VLC and Media Player Classic that work just fine with MKV.

But hey, I'm happy to see anything that gets publicity and promotes the idea of not using DRM. So if he can succeed, more power to him.

Never mind that the S in SD stands for Secure, as people learned with the release of Windows Mobile 7.

Said phone OS used that security "feature" to lock the card to the specific phone. Funny enough the only phone OS that could undo the lock was Symbian...

Anyways, what the world needs is not yet another wrapper format. What it needs is a freely usable, cross platform file system that can be used on high capacity storage media. FAT32 max out on 4GB file sizes, and ExFat is patented. About the closest thing we got is UDF, as i think Vista and Win7 accept non-optical media with that FS (and XP will read it at least).

I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If you want a HD movie on an SD card, all you have to do is copy the movie file onto the SD card. Are fancy menus and a player really necessary? There are several perfectly good free players such as VLC and Media Player Classic that work just fine with MKV.

But hey, I'm happy to see anything that gets publicity and promotes the idea of not using DRM. So if he can succeed, more power to him.

Media Player Classic is an awesome program. It is my preference over VLC. It also comes in 64 bit version.

Regarding the cost of the media. If the media is "that expensive" then it doesn't take too long to copy 8gb from a computer to an SD card (well if your using *nix anyway).

The thought of having menu's and stuff is nice because it allows you to select language see extras without fumbling around the menu structure. Because in an indy setting, I could charge 10 bucks for the movie, and if you wanted extras such as commentary or other stuff you pay more. If the code is smart enough the lack of content in the other folders will keep those items hidden until you decide to pay for them and move it on the media.

What would be really nice though is a all of this integrated in to the MVK container so I only have 1 file to click on.

Are SD cards still considered "expensive media"? I can get a 8gb micro SDHC card for $7 or less on Newegg. A FOSS codec on a 7-dollar card should be easily redistributable for less than $10 total, wouldn't you think? Actually less than that, if it's left to end users to supply their own media.

Problem with this is that it's still considerably more expensive than a DVD and almost the same price with a Blu-ray disk, and prices only go up with the available storage, especially when you consider that Blu-ray discs hold 25GB per layer and almost all movies released on that format using 50GB.

That means that your profit margins as an artist suddenly shrink if you want to keep the price competitive, or, if you decide to raise the price to cover the additional expense, there'll be even less people buying your film.

Why would I want to store movies on multiple slow and expensive SD cards in an inferior format? A 64GB microSHXC card costs £45 in the UK, not to mention the fact that he plans to use VP8 instead of H.264 (or the forthcoming HEVC).

I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If you want a HD movie on an SD card, all you have to do is copy the movie file onto the SD card. Are fancy menus and a player really necessary? There are several perfectly good free players such as VLC and Media Player Classic that work just fine with MKV.

But hey, I'm happy to see anything that gets publicity and promotes the idea of not using DRM. So if he can succeed, more power to him.

Media Player Classic is an awesome program. It is my preference over VLC. It also comes in 64 bit version.

Regarding the cost of the media. If the media is "that expensive" then it doesn't take too long to copy 8gb from a computer to an SD card (well if your using *nix anyway).

The thought of having menu's and stuff is nice because it allows you to select language see extras

None of that requires a new format. You can just use the formats that already exist and ditch the DRM.

The older formats are ultimately nothing more than files on a disk. Changing from an optical disk to a hard drive or and SD drive really doesn't mean anything. Many media player programs can treat a directory or an ISO image just like he original. No new format is needed.

DRM is optional no? I mean you can produce a DVD without any DRM. People do so all the time with home movies. Pirated movies have the DRM removed, yet are shipped in regular formats like AVI and MPEG. So why is a new format needed?

Blu-Ray requires DRM for discs that will play in set-top video players using the standard BD format. A BD-ROM disc does not require DRM for pure data discs,and some players will go ahead and play .mp4 files kept on a BD-data disc, but that is not compliant with the actual Blu-Ray specification and will not work for everyone.

HD-DVD did not require DRM, but it also didn't support any sort of region protection scheme, so the studios were a bit less-than-thrilled with it.

Are SD cards still considered "expensive media"? I can get a 8gb micro SDHC card for $7 or less on Newegg. A FOSS codec on a 7-dollar card should be easily redistributable for less than $10 total, wouldn't you think? Actually less than that, if it's left to end users to supply their own media.

I can get 25gb on a single layer bluray for a dollar at retail, so we're talking over 20 times the price per GB. Producing them on a commercial scale we're talking cents per disk.

Unless there's a printable, read only storage method that could make SDHC significantly cheaper and the size makes distributing cheaper (which is viable) then there's not much point. If the user can supply their own media, just stick it online and let them download it to whatever they want, we don't need standards for that at all.

Whole thing seems a waste of time, paying someone who's under-skilled to produce an unnecessary product.

I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If you want a HD movie on an SD card, all you have to do is copy the movie file onto the SD card. Are fancy menus and a player really necessary? There are several perfectly good free players such as VLC and Media Player Classic that work just fine with MKV.

But hey, I'm happy to see anything that gets publicity and promotes the idea of not using DRM. So if he can succeed, more power to him.

Media Player Classic is an awesome program. It is my preference over VLC. It also comes in 64 bit version.

The difference is that MPC is tied to the Windows media codec backend. VLC is independent and cross platform, and so basically self contained.

You could probably compile VLC for Windows, Linux and Mac, drop the binaries along with videos on a FAT32 drive, and be able to play em back on just about any computer that could read the drive.

There is a difference between standard file-formats and media formats. Most operating systems will be nice and display the contents of media disks as files and folders, but many formats don't actually do that.

I like the idea, odd as it is. I think the fact that they know that this probably wont take off in any meaningful way is important to remember.

So the whole reason for this guys idea to write a new format is to avoid royalties. See what patents are doing to us. Instead of putting his mind to some real use, he feels he has to create another movie format to go with the 100 or so already formats out there. WFT.

Dvds are fragile. I use usb's. I get that part, but that is nothing new either. Sad thing is most people don't know you can use a flash drive for movies and music with out having to have an IPOD.

So in summary: After "a year of publishing articles about the idea and presenting to people" nobody was interested in doing it for him. Then he thought 'How hard can it be?' and decided to do it himself, although he's "not a pro".

The problem is when you plug in a USB or SD card or data CD/DVD into a computer ... nothing happens. At least in the mind of the average computer user. Yes, techies know to look for a mounted drive, find the media and use the right media player to open it.

Not really sure how to handle the case where nobody supports a standard. Sure you could have a MKV container combining a royalty free codec and an open source media player (binaries for multiple OSes). You could fit relatively good HD quality on a cheap 9GB DVD. But having it automatically play = recipe for viruses & trojans.

The problem is when you plug in a USB or SD card or data CD/DVD into a computer ... nothing happens. At least in the mind of the average computer user. Yes, techies know to look for a mounted drive, find the media and use the right media player to open it.

Erm, you know that by default, Windows pops up with a menu to ask what you want to do when you plug in a usb stick or memory card. It will even check it for video files and ask if you want to open it with media player.

Anyway, I'm not seeing the point of this. Isn't an open source .mkv .264 thing already available for free? And why send expensive SD cards instead of just using a torrent. The pirates figured out how to distribute high quality, universally accessible content years ago.

Everyone seems to be forgetting one thing...set top boxes. There are a LOT of little media tanks like the Nbox that will take SD cards and I bet these companies that makes those STBs would be happy to support a royalty free format.

So I can see what he is going for here, it would make a cheap and easy way for the average person (read not geek) to just plug a movie into a STB and watch the content easily. sounds like a nice idea to me.

The problem is when you plug in a USB or SD card or data CD/DVD into a computer ... nothing happens. At least in the mind of the average computer user. Yes, techies know to look for a mounted drive, find the media and use the right media player to open it.

Erm, you know that by default, Windows pops up with a menu to ask what you want to do when you plug in a usb stick or memory card. It will even check it for video files and ask if you want to open it with media player.

Microsoft disabled AutoRun since early 2011 due to security concerns, and I honestly haven't seen that prompt ever since; are you sure you've updated your OS recently?

Really don't see the point of this. Producing a movie on SD cards is too expensive on the hardware side (you get BR discs for about $1, mass production is way cheaper). So, there is plenty of room to pay for BR authoring, codec royalties, etc.

The only upside I see here is the menu Idea. It's actually a pretty cool idea to have some kind of HTML based menu embedded inside a matroska file. You could add multiple streams, media etc in the container and have a nice menu to display. And if it would be just an addition to matroska, it wouldn't be limited to one coded like VP8 (a decision I understand, IP wise, but is too limiting).

But I'm not sure if there is a large need for it. Apple developed some kind of html based menu system for its iTunes movies, but there are still just a few movies using it. Obviously no one was interested.

The problem is when you plug in a USB or SD card or data CD/DVD into a computer ... nothing happens. At least in the mind of the average computer user. Yes, techies know to look for a mounted drive, find the media and use the right media player to open it.

Erm, you know that by default, Windows pops up with a menu to ask what you want to do when you plug in a usb stick or memory card. It will even check it for video files and ask if you want to open it with media player.

Anyway, I'm not seeing the point of this. Isn't an open source .mkv .264 thing already available for free? And why send expensive SD cards instead of just using a torrent. The pirates figured out how to distribute high quality, universally accessible content years ago.

I don't think this is a brilliant idea, but stop with the 'TORRENTZ' comments, ok?

Torrents don't scale down. That is the entire torrent concept in a nutshell. Torrents are great for popular content, and if you're distributing about 10 of these at a time (wedding videos in 3d4k?) it doesn't work.

Personally, I think there might be potential on the cutting edge. No one is distributing 4k stuff, and that won't work well even on broadband. But then again, he's not an expert offering value or even connections to the industry, so it looks pretty doomed. There is a lack of 4k on the market, so that's potentially an opportunity, but it doesn't look like he can fill the need technically. I'm not even positive that cards will actually lower in price (they tend to add capacity because the market wants the largest affordable card to stick in a phone/camera/tablet) and then this doesn't scale.

Love Kickstarter btw. The democratization of the work corporations are supposed to be democratic enough to do, but aren't. It's great to see this discussion on a project before people potentially invest.

Why tie that new format to a specific removable storage medium? (SDHC). Make an extension of the MKV format (MKV is supposed to allow easy extending) that supports a) menus in an open and easy to parse by standalones format (i hope those HTML5 menus fulfill that) and b) the ability to have more than one titles in one .mkv file, so the titles the menus point to aren't on multiple files (like with DVD-Video). There, one whole "movie feature" in a single mkv file.

Then, you can have a standardizing/licensing procedure (similar to the one Divx Inc. has for Divx avi and DivxPlusHD, but more strict), so that you can force manufacturers to have SD card slots and USB in the player and support the correct max bitrates. And mandatory support for ext3 or ext4.

Which leaves what format the video and audio streams will be, aka H.264 vs VP8 and AC3 vs AAC vs Theora... *steps away from that can of worms*

Well all those protection layers are BS. Bluray rips are just as easy to share as dvds for the file sharing community. The problem with sharing Bluray movies is its size. Most torenters will go for a smaller formatted film that has been remuxed to a single file avi mkv mp4 or what ever they choose. There is nothing Hollywood can do to stop some one from duplicating a bluray, other than offer it on a advert funded site. The copy protection does not apply if it is not going to be put on another bluray. If these movies get downloaded they go to a hard drive and get played from there.

The more they try to stop the 3% of the public who participate in file sharing the more trouble they will create for them selves. All they are dong is wasting money and time that could be going to profits.

The scene is alive because of control freaks. The scene enjoys cracking drm just for a laugh. These guys don't do it for the money.

My advice to hollywood would be to learn from these guys business model. Give it away and sell advert space on their sites. Ninja video is one example.

Unfortunately the Capitalist marketplace has become corrupt, and is not longer able to focus on the "bigger picture", instead quarterly results are all that matter. And for the CEO's that run these media companies, "piracy" is a great excuse. Not met the targets they gave to wall street. Simply blame piracy. Don't for one moment think the CEO's aren't above "lending" a friend a copy of the latest and greatest on the golf course, or "borrowing" one of theirs. Being 3 times more likely to show psychopathic tendencies than the average worker they just do so without guilt.

But who can blame them for doing so. You? Any argument you put to them, no matter how truthfully prepared and bulletproof. No chance when there are millions in bonuses they have to justify, and to justify them they have to hit nebulous targets to an unknown entity called "Wall Street" that is mainly run by computers anyway.

If the CEO's didn't have "Wall Street" screaming down their necks (hey, the guys in Wall Street have billions in bonuses to collect, do you think THEY give a fuck about the common person? No way), then they might just be as relaxed about it as you or I.

But the excuse is there for them, and it's a good one. It's just that the excuse has been used a little TOO much, and even judges are starting to see that the proportionality of the IP cases are far and beyond the "crime" itself.

If you wan't to change the world, you have to change "Wall Street", alongside the BAR society as well.

Demanding anything other from individual companies and you're merely pissing in the wind.

But hey, they've (Wall Street/Investment Bankers/Speculators) have already trashed your currency, and are leading you all into Ursuray. You're Fed exchange is printing money so they (the Wall Street Crew) can buy gold with the money from their (actually, yours) bonuses.